Wednesday - April 15, 2020

another day, plus a fox

It’s been a bit challenging getting online here on the PC. We are itching to remodel this place a bit and have been drawing up designs left and right. And then going online to look at washers, dryers, refrigerators, kitchen cabinets, wooden flooring, tiles, paint colors and on and on and on. Sometimes it’s fun, and interesting to play “what if” as we hash out the ideas. Sometimes it gets a bit much, as in “could we hold off on this until I’ve had my first coffee or two this morning?” But it beats reading about you-know-what endlessly.

I think it’s about time to take another trip to the grocery store. I made up a pot of yellow curry tonight, which is a great way to get rid of leftovers. A bit of leftover pork chop, a bit of leftover steak, an onion, half a bag of frozen green beans, a carrot. And plenty of curry paste and a can of coconut milk. Turns out we were out of rice, but with all this remodeling daydreaming we’ve been doing we’ve also moved everything around from this cabinet to that cabinet in the kitchen. And found a couple pounds of sushi rice in one of those airtight containers. I’m sure it’s 7 years old or more. But it cooked up just fine. And we ate well, and I didn’t have to grill.

After dinner I was out on the patio in the dark, checking out the tulips in our side garden, and they’re just starting to open. And I saw a bit of yellowish movement on the hill. I figured it was Ginger our outdoor cat, but it was a fox. Big bushy tail, and her little legs going a mile a minute as she trotted along. Went down the bank behind the tree, but for a second she wasn’t 9 feet away from me. Pretty cool. Yet another member of the menagerie here in the friggin jungle.

Yes, I’ve been watching the news. Best story I’ve seen all day is those protesters arrested in Raleigh. Because exercising your First Amendment rights of peaceable assembly to redress your grievances is now considered a “non-essential” activity by the neo-Gestapo.

Oh, to have a modern Patrick Henry or a Tom Paine with rhetorical skills in the courtroom with them.

Godspeed protesters, sic semper tyrannis!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/15/2020 at 08:41 PM   
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   Sunday - April 05, 2020

all this and the kitchen sink

Life goes on during lock down. The kitchen sink clogged up again so I had to take care of that today. The sink drain has a 12 foot horizontal pipe section under the floor, so it’s kind of prone to clogs. Not enough velocity in the water flow I guess. So I did the usual: go get a bottle of drain opener and pour it in. And nothing happened. Instead of the recommended 15 minute, I left it in overnight. And still nothing. Get out the plastic bellows plunger. That one works great on the toilet and the tub, but it doesn’t fit the kitchen sink. So it’s out to the garage to find the old suction cup plunger. And then I plunged away at it. And nothing happened. Oh joy. So find a bucket, get everything out from under the sink, find my big grip Vise Grips, and open the P-trap. Went in there with a coat hanger wire, couldn’t find anything. Back to the garage to find my hand auger and the power drill. Tried the auger manually first, and found the clog about 8 feet down the line. Spin the handle, work the spring wire back and forth. Got it clear, then went another 4 or 5 feet more. Nothing. Got it out, put everything back together, and it’s cleared. Woo hoo. And my reward for that is getting to do all the dishes that accumulated while the sink was clogged. Joy. But it was kind of nice to do something normal again. Even if we’re still stuck in the house.

  

Posted by Drew458     on 04/05/2020 at 01:05 PM   
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   Wednesday - March 25, 2020

Best Thing To Ever Happen To TV

We have Comcast Xfinity cable TV. In the past year or three it has been upgraded to a voice actuated remote, which is pretty awesome. The package comes with a huge DVR built into the cable box. It also has On Demand, a service that lets you watch whatever show you want whenever you want it, simply by speaking the name into the remote. Pretty awesomer. Recently they have added “Smart Resume” to some of the shows. And this is the bee’s knees. Awesome-ist! Smart Resume lets you skip over the commercials with the 4X Fast Forward, and comes back to your show at the exact proper spot. So a 4 minute block of ads burns by in just 1 minute. This really helps the continuity of the shows you are watching. Beyond excellent; this is how TV should have been since the beginning. On the other hand, you quickly become really aware of just how big a chunk of your 1 hour show is dedicated to commercials. Something like a quarter or a third. Crivens.

Stuck in lockdown, we’ve been binge watching the show Manifest. It’s a bit far fetched, a bit beta-squishy; another one of these “a bunch of lost people miraculously show up and have unknown powers that they use to help people, but the evil government is after them” kind of shows. Like Lost, or the 4400, or Continuum, and so on. We watched the first season in real time, then sort of forgot about it. Season 2 has been broadcast since January, but we just got back to it yesterday. This year, the wife character has been rewritten to be much more involved and supportive. She was far too “Skyler” last year. (Skyler was the annoying wife of Walter White in Breaking Bad, and nearly everyone hated her.) Manifest is a sci-fi soap opera, but it’s something to watch. At least it’s not another doctors/firemen/cops/beautiful evil rich people drama show like all the rest of them are.

I hear Homeland is still running. We watched the first 3 seasons until the Marine guy Brody apparently got killed. It’s now in season 8. So many shows have had a great first season or two, then run on inertia for the next bunch of years. It’s hard to stay a fan when that happens. 

Posted by Drew458     on 03/25/2020 at 11:13 AM   
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   Friday - March 20, 2020

Things Have Changed

I could have written this short post pretty much at any time over the past 5 years, but I’m doing it now because today was the worst of it I’ve ever seen.

We have one grocery store in town. We used to have 2, but the A&P went out of business.

I had my first real job, actually my first real career path, in the grocery industry. I started out as a cashier, eventually went full time, became a manager, and spent 13 years there.  But when I was a cashier, way back in 1977, we had to be fast. And I was the fastest. There were no scanners; you pretty much learned the prices of everything, even though in those Carter days of wild inflation they changed constantly.

Now there seems to be a rule that whoever is the slowest, most dimwitted, most nearly dead employee they can find becomes the Express cashier. WTH?

~~~~

We raced in to the grocery store to get a card because her sister is getting married this afternoon. That’s another FUBAR I don’t want to go into, but there have been tears, yelling, phone calls, constantly changing plans and venues ... and the bottom line is, that wedding will take place on the deck in their backyard with just a couple guests, because you can’t have even a small crowd not even in a church, the Justice of the Peace is closed over at Town Hall, and the preacher they did manage to get at the last second is having and Abundance Of Caution and won’t even go in their house. And us, the other 2 guests, but with my wife’s coworker out sick and waiting for EIGHT DAYS now on her coronavirus test results from CDC, neither of us knows if we were exposed. And her dad will be there and he’s in his 80s with various medical conditions. Oh yeah, it’s been so much fun here. A regular stress factory for over a week, with the dial turned up to 11 24-7.

So we’re in the grocery store, got a card and a few things while we’re there, and we go to get on line. But there’s a line director (!!!) who shunts us off to the back of the remote line. Which starts in the dairy aisle, wraps across the frozen food zone, down the far side, across the back, up the other side, back out of the dairy zone, and then all the way down the nearly empty bread and toilet paper aisle. Had to be at least 100 customers, all doing Social Distancing. We’d be there for hours. And the front end has just 3 registers going and no baggers. Because it’s 1:30 in the afternoon and that’s the slack time usually.

To Hell with this.

So I was a good former grocery store boy and put the meat back. We left the rest in the cart and went across the lot to Walmart. Which wasn’t very busy because 1) they have almost no food in their mini-grocery area, and 2) while they had NO cashiers on duty, they’ve converted the front end to have about 16 Self Check stations. She got the exact same card and was out in 3 minutes.

And now the rumor is that NJ is going to shut down the liquor stores like PA did yesterday. What fun!!

At least I have time to grab a shower and get my clothes through the dryer. Then we can drive an hour, go watch the ceremony while wearing masks and gloves, toast the bride and groom from a distance, and then drive home. In rush hour.

[ hours later ] And we’re back. Actually we were there for 4 hours. It was very nice. The sun came out and the weather was perfect. We had a couple of pizzas delivered for the wedding feast and washed it down with champagne. It was just the 5 of us, and we had a great time talking - well, nearly yelling - as we all stayed a good distance apart on their large deck. And J and G are now happily married, so three cheers for them. We got back, changed clothes, and took a nap.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/20/2020 at 01:12 PM   
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   Wednesday - March 11, 2020

stuffed, like cabbage

We went floor shopping today and found some solid bamboo flooring we really like. Ok, we liked the “camaru” and “koa” wood boards better, twice as thick for twice the price, really strong and durable, but they’re maybe a little too up-market for a condo like this. But what we found is much better than anything that Lowe’s or HD has. So it will be really nice when it gets installed.

Of course, there’s a whole cascade of things we have to do before we’re ready for the floor guys to get to work. Aside from cleaning this place up, and cleaning this place out, we have to get the cat fixed. We love the little beastie inside out, but she goes into heat every few weeks all year long, won’t shut up for an hour, claws all the furniture, pukes on the rugs every damn day, and sprays on our stuff. And we have some stuff that’s way too good to be piddled on by some horny little cat. So it’s time. We tried to do this when she was a kitten, but her health was poor and we almost lost her in the surgery. She turned blue and stopped breathing and the doc had to stop, bring her back, and sew her up. I really hope she’s up to it by now, 3 years later. But we have to take the risk or else we’ll be living in decrepit soiled conditions and cat piss stink. No thanks.

So as long as we were down there, we hit the polish deli. OMG. I could have dropped $500 in a flash. They had such a great selection of all kinds of yummy stuff, from massive kielbasa to fresh ham to all kinds of pieroges, fresh bread, candies, all kinds of freshly made things from stuffed cabbage to potato pancakes to cheese to those Polish cookies with a name I can’t pronounce. Plus all kinds of imported Polish food in cans and jars. We got beets, 8lb of various massive kielbasa, polish sauerkraut with carrots, barilki (chocolate candy barrels filled with whiskey) and a whole selection of freshly made frozen pieroges. And we cooked it up when we got home, and ate like starving pigs. OMG. I did one coarse kielbasa on the grill, along with a couple pork chops we had that needed cooking. Ate that with some of the sauerkraut after adding a small amount of caraway seeds, and some lightly pieroges with butter and sour cream. Horry cats, I’m stuffed, and we have leftovers for days. So good.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/11/2020 at 07:31 PM   
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   Friday - February 07, 2020

built in weather report

Got up this morning and my knees were killing me. Arthritis they tell me, and it’s about time to get another round of those hylauronic acid shots, which really did the trick for about 6 months.

Anyway, they really bother me when it gets super cold, but they bother me more when it’s chilly, very moist, and the barometric pressure is dropping. All of which is what happens before a winter rain. It’s been rather damp here for several days, and now it’s pouring out. Funny thing, my knees feel better now that it’s raining. And I’m glad that it’s raining ... in February. This could have been a serious snow fall if it was colder, but we’re having a pretty mild winter here. Almost all the moisture that has fallen from the sky since the middle of December has been rain.

Ruh roh, the lights just blinked and dimmed. Better post this before the power blips off.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/07/2020 at 10:43 AM   
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   Sunday - January 12, 2020

Fixed, For Now

Had to fix the toilet this afternoon. There was some kind of slow leak. Worse, the cat pan is right next to it, and you know how messy kittehs are. And we use that clumping litter, so it was kind of a gummy mess down there. American Standard sent me a new tank a few weeks ago, warranty replacement for the old tank that had developed a little crack, but wasn’t yet leaking. I figured I had a fussy job ahead of me, taking off the water line, getting the float valve, the flush lever, and the flapper mechanism out of the old tank and into the new one. But when I opened the box, inside was a whole new top to the toilet: new tank, new lid, new float valve, lever, and flapper. All installed and adjusted. Thanks American Standard!!

So I took it all apart, got it cleaned up and off the floor. There was a whole clam farm of wet cat litter silt under the bowl. That had to go. Scrubbed it all up, then sanitized the whole area with my good old D-128 disinfectant. And then I found that it was the water line valve that was the culprit, along with the crush washer in the water hose. Too late to go to the store, so I did what I could do with tape dope and some silicon caulk. Good enough for tonight. I know you’re not supposed to, but I put the bowl back in with a nice bead of caulk under it, so it’s sealed to the floor. If I have to, I can use a knife or a spatula to get it off, but for now there won’t be anymore litter mud underneath. That made it nearly impossible to get the floor clean.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/12/2020 at 12:08 AM   
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   Sunday - January 05, 2020

Mr. Busy Today

Got a whole lot of things done today, along with my usual Sunday cleaning. Even went out to the local Mexican restaurant for dinner, because sometimes I just don’t feel like cooking. El Patron. It’s pretty good. Not the usual slapdash tacos and basic burritos. Got back here and set up our new home phone. The other one died after about a decade, although the LCD display had been going downhill for quite some time. The new phone is amazing. Caller ID, blocking, it talks to you, OMG the features are endless. I got one with 4 handsets, so we have them everywhere now. I put in all the phonebook numbers, the answering machine message, checked and cleared all the old voicemail messages, etc, right from one of the handsets. [ Ok, I kept the voicemail message from JayD (Peiper) when he called here just after hurricane Sandy, a week after we’d moved in. You know, I think that’s the only time I ever heard his voice. I spoke to his wife Jen several times in the years after that, but they’re both gone now. I miss them both so much. So I’m saving that one. ] No need to stand in the kitchen working the base station. So far it sounds nice and clear, although Panasonic put papers in the box telling me all about the additional handsets I can buy with super duper HD audio, or ones with mil-spec waterproof outdoor capability, or a range extender, and so forth. Maybe later. In case we decide we really, really have to have a phone in the bathroom. Um, no. I’ll call you back after my shower, not during it.

~~~~

Ok, now onto a bit of laundry and then I can spend some time with my new book. I’m reading the Peter Ash series by Nick Petrie. It’s about a guy who did too many tours with the Marines, suffers from claustrophobic PTSD, and is trying to put his warrior life behind him, but he keeps getting pulled into violent adventure mysteries back here in the USA. It’s pretty good writing, not another one of these formula books that the top adventure novel authors are churning out these days. I’m halfway through book #1, The Drifter, though I started with book #2 Burning Bright and got hooked. Book #5 comes out the week after next, but won’t be in paperback for another year. I don’t buy hardcover pulp fiction, and I almost never get Kindle or other kinds of digital books. I want the book in my hands. I want to go to the library and borrow one, or to the store and buy one. I’d go to my local Walmart, but they’ve remodeled the place yet again, and now the book section is just 8 feet long, is way in the back of the store, and all they seem to have is books by James Paterson. Hey, Paterson is fine, but sometimes I want more than just another police detective murder mystery story.

~~~~

We watched the movie adaptation of Les Miserables last night, starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and half of Hollywood. It ran almost 3 hours, and really wasn’t that great. Some things might just be better on the stage. They did keep the songs, and the performance of Do You Hear The People Sing? was pretty good. Definitely gets you fired up emotionally. The French getting Revolutionary. And then they all get killed.

Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men?
It is the music of the people who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums, there is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!

Posted by Drew458     on 01/05/2020 at 09:32 PM   
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   Wednesday - December 18, 2019

When The Alma Matters

One for all, and all for one, forever.

A pretty weird situation that needs to be nipped in the bud ... as an undergraduate 25 years ago I formed close bonds with the kids I fenced with. I heard today that one of those people - a guy now in his late 40s - is trying to hit on the 15 year old daughter of another of them, a gentle woman I cherished and always teasingly called my lioness. The guy was a bit odd back in the day, but he’s since become a delusional nut case. Harmless up until now, but a real pain in the arse with all his strange emails. But sending a Facebook message to the child’s mom, saying he wants to date her daughter when she turns 16, and reminding mom that that’s the age of consent, providing the daughter can prove it with her driver’s license ... is way over the top. EEEEW, and kind of frightening.

Lucky for us that any number of our crew have gone on to become lawyers. One of which this guy has harassed for years already.

Don’t mess with the lioness’s cubs. We will ALL come down on you.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/18/2019 at 01:42 PM   
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   Tuesday - December 17, 2019

winter wonderland

The latest storm system is slow, wet, and chilly. It’s just around the freezing mark, so we didn’t get any snow. We had freezing rain, but not a whole lot of it. And we’re going to get wobbly weather for the rest of the day and the rest of the week.

But right now, all the plants are covered with a thin glaze of ice. Nothing dangerous; no falling trees or power lines or slippery roads. Just a shiny crusting on every bit of nature out there. It’s very pretty. Cold, wet, fairly miserable, highly overcast, but pretty. For now.

2 cups of whole milk microwaved until it boils
another cup of whole milk microwaved while you’re making the recipe.
6 tbs sugar
5 tbs cocoa powder, perhaps 6
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla

mix sugar salt cocoa in a medium pot. transfer in 1/2c hot milk. Stir until it’s sludge. do same with another 1/2c. add the rest and some vanilla, stir. Add next cup of boiled milk. Heat mugs in microwave 30 seconds. Add hot cocoa.
Makes a full mug of yum for 2. mini marshmallows optional.

Drink while looking out the window and praising the consumption of fossil fuels. Order take out and have it delivered.

The whole idea of civilization is to get as far away from nature as possible.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/17/2019 at 11:44 AM   
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   Thursday - December 12, 2019

Life In A Small Town

Out on the highway here there was a truck accident at 4am. Closed the entire eastbound side. Traffic backed up to Pennsylvania; that’s a 15 mile long jam up. Everybody and their emotional support chicken tried to find a way around, but there really aren’t any. Traffic was jammed solid on every side street and through town. The morning rush was a nightmare, a parking lot for 5 hours. Somehow, somebody finally did something somewhere, and stopped the bypass traffic from coming through. Town emptied out, all the side roads cleared up.

Traffic is still backed up for miles on eastbound Interstate 78 in Hunterdon County after a tractor-trailer crashed and spilled more than 100 gallons of fuel and oil early Thursday, officials said.

The tractor-trailer struck the center median near exit 17 in Clinton Township at 3:54 a.m, State Police Sgt. Jeff Flynn said. The driver was not badly hurt and no other vehicles were involved. About 100 gallons of fuel and 15 gallons of oil ended up on the road.

Traffic cameras show debris in the center median and traffic still jammed at 9:05 a.m.

Sigalert.com shows traffic backed up to about Exit 12 as of 9:05 a.m. Side roads near Interstate 78 are also clogged with traffic.

It was almost eerie going downtown around 8:40. There was hardly a car on the roads. It’s a nice reminder of just how small our small town is. The vast majority of traffic we get is pass-through. There really aren’t that many locals. Too bad that Clinton is at a road nexus, but that’s where towns grow up after all.

Once upon a time, when New Jersey really was The Garden State, this corner was a farming community. Hey, Flemington was the once egg capital of the tri-state area, perhaps the nation!

In 1955 nearly 450,000 cases of eggs were sold as well as 65,000 crates of live chickens. By then it had become a $2 million a year business and a prototype for other operations across the country. In 1960 the name was changed to the Flemington Agricultural Market. In 1976 the auctions were discontinued due to lack of suppliers, as there were fewer livestock and poultry farmers in the area.

And a big pottery factory too!

But in the post-war years with the demise of the railroads and the opening of the interstates, the rise of grocery store convenience over farmer’s market freshness, other areas could now feed the cities, and farming and everything else diminished here. When Route 78 went through in the 1960s local farming pretty much went belly up and the whole county went back to sleep for a decade. But as the cities grew, suburban sprawl happened. And housing developments sprang up everywhere for the next 40 years. Now we’re on the outer edge, but our infrastructure isn’t much more advanced than when this was farmland. There is no room to add extra lanes to the highway. Not that I-78 is small; it’s a 6-8 lane highway for most of it’s length. When it was built it was a superhighway. It’s just that NJ has become the pass-through state. And when traffic gets bad, the pass-through shifts to all the local roads.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/12/2019 at 09:31 AM   
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   Saturday - November 30, 2019

Free is the best price

OK, we made it through Thanksgiving. We had a great time at her dad’s, had tons of good food and good company, and didn’t get caught in a hurricane or a blizzard on the drive home this time. So, winning!!  Had my mother and brother down here for an extended visit, and fed them 4 or 5 times while cooking up a storm. As always, the bread I took got eaten immediately; didn’t get a chance to have fun with the “panda pee” jokes I had ready. The two kinds of stuffing went quickly too, although one got scorched a bit when the hostess reheated them a bit much. Her oven was running real hot; the turkey was done 2 hours sooner than it should have been. The white wine I brought, a 2015 Poilly-Fume, was quite nice and I managed to get several glasses of it. And her cheesecake was excellent, with or without the fresh raspberry reduction topping. So that was a plus, all around. And we’ve nibbled up most of the leftovers already.

Our breaking toilet didn’t break, and it survived our guests. A small miracle. We spent a couple hours this morning shopping online for a new one, perhaps a better one, but couldn’t quite agree on which one to get. The ADA rules have taken over the toilet industry, and it’s difficult to even find a “standard” height (15” tall) toilet; nearly everything is a “comfort height” “right height” et al ADA-compliant height 17” bowl, which is fine if you’re really old, in a wheelchair, or well over 6 feet tall. For the rest of us, it’s a bit of a balancing act. The one we have is like that, and it’s really too tall for her, seeing as she’s barely 5 feet. So after not zeroing in on one particular model, I looked up a replacement 4215A tank, and when I finally found one it was 80% of the price of an entire regular toilet, or a third the price of a fancy one. So ... what the heck, let me see if it’s under warranty from American Standard. A few web page menus later, a whole lot of “clicking in circles”, and I gave up on trying to get a chat mode session going, and found the actual telephone contact number off in one dusty corner of their site. Called them, went through a whole bunch of “press 1 for ...” steps, and then got in the wait queue. Somebody answered finally, and was really nice, and helpful, and within a minute or two I had a new tank being shipped to me for no cost. Free. It’s going to take about 10 days to get here, so it’ll be super glue and duct tape and prayers until then. But spending nothing but some of my weekend time is a lot cheaper than dropping $450 on a new fancy throne. So I’m happy. Meanwhile, I gave ours a really close inspection, and I think the very slow leak is probably coming from where the float valve thingy screws through the bottom of the tank. So when the new one gets here I’ll make sure to have some fresh washers and a little tube of silicon caulk, so that I can put all the old internals in the new tank and not have the drips.

And we’ve got snow in the forecast for Monday.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/30/2019 at 03:34 PM   
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   Tuesday - November 26, 2019

Time to get focused

Ok, I’ve bopped around the internet long enough this morning. Time to get cleaned up, go to the grocery store, and get some last minute housework done because tomorrow is The Day Before and we’ve got guests coming by.

So, enough reading and research into the international donkey shortage and global population decimation. All because of a major rise in China for some traditional folk medicine. They take donkey hides, boil them down, and make gelatin out of them. For snacks, for face cream, and for medicine to improve the yin and yang. Am I the only one who notices that a huge part of their pharmacopeia is all about improving the sex bits? And instead of killing off the wild animals all around the world, why not look into this stuff scientifically and see if a) it actually works, and b) if it does, is there any difference between the donkey killer based stuff and Knox gelatin made with mineral water?

Right, and no more reading up on the hot rod stuff. Yeah, if I had the time, money, space, inclination, and access to some skilled machine shops, I would enjoy building up a Mopar 340 or an old school Pontiac V8. Hell, I can dream of an aluminum 455 SD with modern fuel injection. Torque monster!! And drop it into a 1974 Ventura for the ultimate sleeper rod. Looks like granny’s old grocery getter, runs in the mid 10s. On pump gas. And with a lightweight block it might even handle a bit. Throw in a DNE+5 style trans and some highway gears in the back, and it will probably get 30mpg on the highway too. DNE = Doug Nash Engineering, a custom kind of transmission that is not only super strong, it puts all the gear multiplication in the transmission, European style. This lets you use pitiful numbered highway gears in the back, but the car revs up like it has a 3.75, but when you get to 4th gear it’s kind of game over, and 5th gives you an overdrive on an already numb rear axle, which makes for highway cruising at just over idle speed. That gives you great mpg but you need an engine with good and smooth low low end torque. You also get a top speed in the Indy 500 realm, but who cares? I’m just thinking of ways to have my cake and eat it too, without going to some computer owned sewing machine size mini-mill with lots of turbo bits temporarily attached.

To work then. Woo hoo.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/26/2019 at 10:57 AM   
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   Sunday - November 24, 2019

But of course

We’re doing what we can to clean this place up before people come over for Thanksgiving. Gave the bathroom a good scrub, and noticed a vertical crack in the toilet tank. It’s one of those Champion mega-flush things, which we bought about 4 years ago. POS, figuratively and literally I guess.

Hope it lasts through the holiday, and that no guests need to sit down with force. And we can go toilet shopping on Black Friday, oh joy.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/24/2019 at 02:40 PM   
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
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4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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